The Hunch

There’s so little town in between us.
I thought that would be
the solution; a resounding nail-bit
crack in the box that was
supposed to be a treasure trove.
With the streets so short, my
skirt could be too,
and that was all the reason I
might shiver up to you. A corner away,
maybe. I’d take them all on
tipsy toes, just in case. In your case.

I wanted to be in your case. This
tiny place pivoting the world should have
tumbled me into you, at the same time it
held my ankles steady. I could have been a tower.
Every day was a chance.

But you are a man with small
lungs and heavy breath. You kneaded all the space.
I walked around in a flower vase even though
you refused to see me as the bouquet.
Gasping, panting;
I was wilting.

It was our roads which cut
us, to the quick:
Each of my moves you could see;
you were right down my neck about it.
And you making an Atlas out of me
turned into a hunchback complex:
I knew—it’s how close we were—
this foyer, that hallway, the very lawn I stood on
was your next canvas, to sigh at me
head to toe. A judge twiddling his hammer.
Making me bend, crane, stoop,
lest I look silly to so-serious you.

I just wanted to take a step without
touching all of my nerves, without
waiting for all your weight to hit me.
I had a hunch; you made it bad.
That’s not going to mold me. So would you
take the next turn, away, so I might
unwind myself.

An Arrival at Afterward

My eyesight’s now one hundred
days in retrospect. How could I
have known that three April’s worth of hurt
would come to quiet death by the July
that dutifully finally followed. Through and through-
out I said I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out
on a thing even a bullet could teach; that’s why I declined
to dodge you, smoke rising then from your eyes
to that handgun handshake. Too bad it came to
cloud me over, and I was so long dryice-mystified
til the truth reigned as rain and hosed it down.

You mattered most when you were
my muse. You’d better beckon luck
to be yours if you want to ever again arrive
on a climate with climaxes like
you found at my side. The danger’s over, your
feelgood comedown gone. Look and there’s nobody
left to sing for you. How’s it feel for you?
Tragic! Because it always was, I bet for me it’s different—

It’s hard to make a soul
that’s been pinched back from the brink
of systemic shutdown believe and behave
in a bold voice. But I may say,
if in a fit of inspired inclination: do you know what?
I’m happier now than I’ve been
by far; far back behind as the oceans prehistoric
when they collected and came to draw apart
me and you. That was the last era
the sun lifted on a smile, but I remember it
in instinct and have not a problem
molding like fluid into the motions—first
finger-sucking clean the shot wounds. Allowing the lid
of a tugboat to close the gape that would yawn awake
with me in the mornings. Again and again coming to rest
in flowerbeds, until the fragrance adopted into
my skin. Tell me what this sounds like:
Straight-kneed stance from my bike pedals. Apple slices
chill in my cheeks fresh from being picked. A dance a day, while
music plays loud always near me; never stops like other things do.
I lost my license but that is joy,
right? I recognize it. I’m recalling it.

It’s a slow dawn, the brightest one. On me now;
the light. Only No One would have guessed it, and,
who are you, again?

(You’ve got so little poetry left in you.
There’s a lot
you’ll never say to me, and that’s
a likely line
I’d be the first
triumphant tenor in the chorus over.)

Consolation Paradise

You weren’t supposed to win,
you see; partially. After all
the scrapes my knees sustained
and my post kept a year’s worth of
nights by the windowsill, still
asking for angels and looking for
the return. It’s what I should have got—
if not in you than just not
you in any way, okay? The altar was always
mine to take, and gods were going to
wed me to my requests forever.

That and I thought
things were through being partial
to you. But what do I know of the
world, I guess. Because this place continues on
behaving like there’s a lockdown on
summer feeling until you pull back up and grace
in a graze the tiny keyhole your love
fits into.
It’s canvas to your artist.
I’m bent up in this:

Nothing’s been brushed for days.
My hair, the secret soft spot
underside my arms, or sunshine upon
the landscape. All the outside-looking glass ever shows is
rain. I check each hour, stupid with hope,
and overcast is the only option as far as my vision
can see; I’ll need the sky to stop
missing you if I want even a shot
at not missing you.

And I haven’t felt healthy since
the day you left me. Heartsick: laughable myth,
right? Then what makes me drop my neck
against the shower stall wall to cool each morning’s
fever, and explain the vinegar stew that sits
in bed with me all nights, threatening to sail up
my throat. I wonder about the momentum
to make me the sick one—when it should be you
and the cause and the cure should be home.

I was the one
who was left. My God: I was loyal
to a fault! I ought to earn the consolation paradise.
I wanted to know I had universal support
in carrying on. Instead everything’s broken
for you. You are probably so sunburnt
you’re moaning.

Now, Now

The choral comfort my mother has
offered since I was younger; the same we’ve all got
once the first childhood began. Words ladled like
syrup, like serum, with the accompaniment of
a crop circle buffed onto your back. Attempt to swipe
blurry the target that rent the space before
hand.

I’ve always wanted to believe
in mysticism that satiated generations, and kiss
the fingers that fed my ease. But the
whispers sting. When I say “ow”
I get “now, now,” and that’s the spring
of the pain.

For you
know I was blind in happiness every instant
those days wrought. I spun
in golden circles, made every crack a domain,
laughed from my face and into others: because I was here
and this was now. Never looked over your head
or ahead of my shoulders.
I didn’t invest beyond one meager era.

Sure there’s a girl
twenty years from now who’s me and who’s over it,
but the one who’s two weeks in and after
could have used a plan of protection, a fallout shelter
for the grief that comes when her favorite spells
have passed and been lived.

Live on the inside, as you must. We’re all
encased by our eyelids anyway, we can’t escape
to see any farther out. There is no
forcing a future, any present we get
precludes and manifests the celebration;
the exclusive acclaim. This second solely
matters: a prescriptive mentality so
you stay lively in your enduring aliveness.
Swear it was only a moment
ago—I had one
that I squeezed tight like I’d
been taught I thought, but then
it popped and
I hate this now. Remember that
what you can, when you can lone as it occurs; but hope
you’re ready to nurse your stingy-spent
self when the time comes, when the time
ends.

Bonfires and High Water

Gather round;
it’s the first and only thing you need
to say. People leap up when
logs are being teepeed, on tiptoes to
make a stack that will last
past midnight’s hours. The air
chill with anticipation, not just because the sunset
is stealing our source of heat. We want the night,
we make our own light.

A matchstick struck, we all track its
spark and fizz. Tipped into the pit to meet
its wooden flint, the point of impact grows
from the size of that pin until we’ve got
a blazing halo between us.

There’s jostling for the lawnchairs in the
front row, jutting of pebble-whittled twigs skyward where
cinders mingle and alight on marshmallows. Soon
everyone’s teeth are sticky but with a ukulele
interlude we still sing the stars out of their shelter.
They’re shining
in your eyes.

Conversation pours long as the drinks flow. Mostly it’s
made in pokes—to the ribs and ego. We’re friends
after all. Hope we communicate this way
til we’re gone from all kinds of places. My leg’s on the vinyl arm
of your rustic rocker, heel cupped in the mesh pocket
where your can would rest. Close enough to have another’s
graham cracker crumbs dust my kneecaps.

Eventually the clock strikes everyone as melancholy.
Someone says something about
somebody long missing. The circle loosens its diameter
a little. It’s quiet outside of our breathing, and inside
it boils and bites. Demons come curling forth
from the smoke and flicker amidst us because they always
make room for themselves to belong.

The environment we’re in is ideal,
though. A ring, dotted in diamonds
of humans without a single sharp edge. Chocolate to comfort
at the crook of a finger. And an inferno that’s
refused surrender for so very long, since it was built.
We made this glow with our hands.
We made these friends for our lives.
And I’m trying to tell you: the only luck there is
is in the people you meet. And then that,
I’m not even sure is luck. What matters is
we’ll forever have these bonfires
to meld together
another high-water mark
for us.

It’s just the truth—
All eyes are honest on a fire,
and when you tire of
that decadent silence the stories that
come

are similar

shoutouts in

to nature.

Quietpatch

I want to discard the days
where we don’t speak; make up
a calendar of dates that barely matter.

It’s the first according to columns but the square
that deserves a star will be
the first in weeks
you think of me strong enough to
say so. Wherever you go for that while
you take the world’s music with you. I don’t
worry but I do wonder;
what I could do to beckon that symphony back.

Until the buds open in my ears again, put me to sleep,
like Shakespeare’s fairies—
easy if it means alone; sash up my eyes, jaw,
and chest. It’s the blowing dust that must
do it: settle on my lashes and drop them low,
and create the wasteland that you wreak when
you’re hushed. I don’t care
to hear what you’re not saying.

So turn me off like that;
and then it becomes morning
on your breath alone. A bolt upright to
the sweet sitar alarm you’re setting off from
my bedside—murmuring, hoping it’s
my name—the dream is forgotten because
reality arrives.
Every time I stir the reason will be
you’re talking and therefore the sunshine is broadening;
It’s birdsound:
you’re back around.

Join the Club (Or Don’t, and Save Yourself from Vomiting)

There has been only one occasion in my life wherein I consumed every bite of every food item positioned on my plate. I had returned two days before from an exotic Caribbean vacation, and found myself needing to gorge with a fervor that has bred a stereotype of national proportions. Indeed, my desire felt nearly instinctual, latent, patriotic. Nothing could be more American; and never was I more American, than when I tucked in to that homecoming feast. George Washington himself served me that day, I think, Perkins nametag pinned to his excellently preserved chest.
There’s a club, from what I understand, for the type of people who can achieve this food consumption feat on a regular basis. That’s what I learned while on my exotic Caribbean vacation (not solely, but it is the most imminently relevant dispatch). At a roadside restaurant nearing high-end, I was seated innocuously about midway down our table, which stretched out to an obscene length hardly necessary beyond Thanksgiving dinners with your entire extended family. I was skeptically spearing my spaghetti and then letting it unfurl limply back into its bowl, in a hypnotic cycle. The peers lined up across from me were tearing into fish, languid on their platters and still in possession of their eyes. I was a mom with a fanny pack at a rally for biker chicks. I was the blandest sight in the room.

Getting Burned

He beat the whirring beginning if the fire alarm by thirty-seven seconds. Probably no one even noticed him, though, crossing the threshold, stamping his boots heartily against the welcome mat. It depicted a cartoon schoolhouse and various stick figure children toddling inside, their faces smeared with grime and slush. But all of that was forgotten for the moment; after all, a frenzy had been ignited. A screaming crush of kindergarteners were frantically scooping up colored pencils and their winter jackets alike to the time of the blare overhead. They scrambled in a rainbow array, simply too much for the brain to process.
Chuck straightened his tie against his throat and moved into the fray. The children’s teachers, his colleagues, were making valiant attempts at wrangling their charges into order. Looks of restrained fear gleamed in their eyes too, however, even as their hands mimed control. Chuck could read the question they were screening across the room to one another over bobbing heads. He even caught the voltage of it directly when one of the staff’s more legendary constituents, Mrs. O’Henry, met his gaze.
There was no drill planned for today, was there?

The Bare Lightness

Sometimes, though it didn’t make a lot of sense, standing directly in the light made Roxie wince. She certainly had prepared to be having one of those cringe-worthy days, had anticipated feeling a mixture of disappointment, shame, regret, and perhaps even extreme embarrassment right about now. Instead, as she stepped foot outside and into the sunlight, she felt only the slow realization that she would not have to entertain any such emotions. The thought could have put a spring in her step, and, hey, she deserved it anyway, didn’t she? With an excited little yelp she finally flung suppression to the wind and broke into a jig routine right there on the sidewalk.
She didn’t care who was watching. In fact, she kind of hoped someone would be. She would look at it as an initiation process. After all, being the object of attention was going to be her raison d’etre in the coming months.
Getting cast as the lead in the play! It was quite an accomplishment. And that was before you even considered all the extenuating circumstances surrounding Roxie; like how she’d taken her freshman year off from being onstage to focus on schoolwork, the fact that this was her first venture into theater─a notoriously exclusive organization─at the university, and the way she’d second-guessed herself the whole time she’d sat huddled in a chair during auditions. So, although she had been doing it since she was quite young, getting up under that spotlight had been a bit nerve-wracking.
And yet, when the director had summoned her forward and she began rattling off her monologue, it was as if a fissure formed in that troublesome lump of fear and doubt and the light was allowed to shine out of her. She had dazzled up on that stage.
To pump her spirits up a bit more, Jeff, casting director, had approached her after the full roster of auditionees had at long last been exhausted, and informed her that she was “absolutely a shoe-in” for the lead role. She’d glowed so bright. Of course, she wouldn’t know for sure if the part was hers until the cast list went up later that night, but she wasn’t opposed to a little premature celebration.

The Softest Place

They were going to make me go. It was made abundantly clear by the way a luggage bag, its jaws open wide and expectant, had shown up mysteriously at the foot of my bed about a week before the trip was scheduled to take place. I scrupulously avoided the bag, of course, leaping around it in order to tunnel my entire body beneath the bed sheets, as had become my customary ritual in recent weeks. I did not want a shred of sunlight to touch me, and that is exactly what the wide windows of my room and the bag both implied to bring into my life.
They always meant well, my friends. I knew that. I understood it was basically the core of friendship, to give care and concern unto another person, and in most scenarios I greatly appreciated the fact that in some eyes this was a thing I warranted. I cherished and championed occasions spent with my friends, I have to say that upfront. At another time, in a different summer, with a heart more intact, I may have been all for a road trip-slash-girls’-weekend-slash-vacation-to-the-cabin, but in my current state of mind, the hyphens just made my head hurt. It sounded like a lot of work, the trip, and I felt fragile.
The worst part, I concluded, was that my fragility may have even been the inspiration behind the outing. My friends, doing their friendly duty, had observed my emotional downfall in the weeks counting down to summer and had planned a weekend getaway in response. It made sense, looking from their viewpoint on the sidelines, which is where I most often and most comfortably found myself. The other side, as I sat experiencing it now, was not nearly as soft a place to land.
The only solution I had for my problems was my bed, which supported and comforted me as I took to it to staunch my tears into day after day. As opposed to the ears of my friends, I wanted only the curves in my pillow to absorb the details of how I’d been shunned by some supposedly insignificant boy at school, and how I’d been incontestably hurt by it. It was embarrassing, for a girl who held her feelings in such high regard that she usually kept them far away from others, to be seduced and ultimately thwarted in the one attempt I’d risked to break the pattern. The school year had ended, I wouldn’t need to see him and be reminded any longer, and I intended to spend the summer healing by way of consuming a gallon of ice cream per day.